Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  I never saw him again.

  He never saw the concerto.

  At fifteen I gave up the violin—and have had a slight distrust of the passions ever since.

  I notice that I often tend to talk (and think) about my childhood just as though music had no part in it—whereas, in reality, I must have spent more hours at it from eight to twice eight than at anything else. And between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, I probably made as much money as a basket musician in Greenwich Village coffee houses as I did from my first four sf novels, written over the same time. (And how interesting that the ages from nineteen to twenty-two are suddenly part of my childhood!)

  17. A dozen poets whose work I have enormously enjoyed in the last couple of years: Michael Dennis Browne, Alice Knotly, Robert Allen, John Oliver Simon, Philip Levine, Robert Peterson, Judith Johnson Sherwin, Ted Berrigan, Robert Morgan, Ann Waldman, Richard Howard, and J. H. Pryne.

  (I am leaving out Marilyn Hacker and Tom Disch; I know them and their work too well!)

  How many of the dozen named have I actually met? Six. Interesting that one, whom I’ve never met at all, felt it necessary to tell a complete stranger, who only accidentally met me six months later, that he was quite a good friend of mine when I lived in San Francisco!*

  18. Down to give a lecture on sf at the University of Kent. In the discussion period after my talk, someone brought up Theodore Sturgeon. I asked the assembly what they particularly liked about his work. From one side of the room, someone shouted, “His aliens!” and from the other side, simultaneously someone else: “His people!” Everyone laughed. Consider this incident for the Sturgeon essay.

  19. Marilyn, from the other room (where she is reading the Jonathan Raban book The Sociology of the Poem and, apparently, has just come to another horrendous misreading [where he goes on about Pickard’s poem “Rape” (he doesn’t apparently remember the title and refers only to a few lines of it) as expressing good will (!) and fellowship (!!) between the young men in the pub and the old woman (whom he, not Pickard, calls a prostitute)]: “Poetry should be as well written as prose—and at least as carefully read!”

  20. In the context of 1948—a vacuum tube technology where most adding machines were mechanical—Gilbert Ryle was probably right in denying the existence of mental occurrences as material events with the nature of mechanical entities, separable from the brain. In the context of 1973—where we have a solid-state technology and electronic computers—we have to rethink: the empirical evidence of neurology, electronics, and cybernetics all point to a revitalization of the concept of mental occurrences as brain processes. A perfectly serious argument seems to be occurring today in philosophy over whether mental occurrences are nonmaterial events that just happen to happen simultaneously with certain brain processes (or are even set off by the brain processes, but are different from the processes themselves), or whether the brain processes are, indeed, the mental occurrences themselves.

  Two things make such an argument seem ridiculous to me—one empirical, the other logical.

  First, it seems as silly to say that the brain contains no model of what the eye sees (which arguers on one side of this argument maintain) as it is to say that the circuitry in a TV camera (that has been turned on) contains no model of what is in front of the image orthicon tube at its proper focal distance. The point is: Anyone who has tried to design a television (or even a radio) circuit from scratch has some idea of just how great the complexity of that model must be: It is practically all process, composed of a series of precisely ordered wave fronts that peak in precise patterns, hundreds-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-times per second, all shunted around, amplified, distorted, and superimposed on one another, in a precise pattern, at close to the speed of light. The philosophers who hold this view, I’m afraid, are simply revealing their inability to conceive even this complexity, empirically demonstrable for processes far simpler than the simplest brain process.

  To take another side of the argument (and it has many more than two) is to get lost in one of the numerous logical contradictions of ordinary speech, which allows us to call “a process” a thing and “an object” a thing too. The internal logical structure of one is distinct from the internal logical structure of the other. All processes are nonmaterial, whether they be brain-processes or the process of raising my hand off the table. At the same time, all processes need material to define them. (If I raise a glass off the table, aren’t I doing the same “thing” as raising my hand off the table . . .? O course I’m not. Which is to say, I am doing the same “thing” [i.e., indulging the same process] only in so far as I am observing the two events at the same degree of empirical resolution. If I want to, I can observe the raising of two more or less identical glasses from the same spot on the table [or even the same glass] at different times, at such a high degree of empirical resolution that their processes can be uniquely differentiated, having to do with drying times of films of water, molecular change and interchange between the table and the glass, etc. And that, alas, exhausts the tale.) Similarly, all material can be defined by process, the most basic of which, for a static object, is simply the process of duration; as it changes (or as I observe it at a higher degree of empirical resolution, so that I become aware of changes in it) we can bring in other processes as well. In this way, all material can be defined by the process (infinitely analyzable into smaller processes) it is undergoing. But the basic terms that are thrown around in this argument—“material event” and “nonmaterial event”—both have an element of self-contradiction (i.e., if “a brain process” can be called “a material event,” then, as the brain is the material, the event must be the process, which implies something like a “material process” . . . which is nonsense of the same order as “a green smell”) that, it would seem to me, renders them both useless for any serious, logical discussion.

  To stand for three hours and watch Vikki Sperling map the image from the retina of the eye of the salamander off the visual tectum of the exposed salamander brain (doubled there, one inverted left-right, and a weaker one right-left) with her gold-filled microelectrodes on their adjustable stands, silences a good deal of the argument in my own head. The behaviorists, with their pretransistor view of the world, say: “But you can’t locate mental occurrences!” We can not only locate them, we can measure them, map them, record them, reproduce them, cut them out, and put them in backwards!

  21. A “word” has a “meaning” in the sense that a train has a track; not in the sense that a train has a passenger. Still, word and meaning in most people’s minds, even most philosophers’ apparently, are the same sort of category-mistake that Ryle tried to show existed in the Cartesian separation between body and mind.

  Words mean.

  But meaning is the interaction of the process into which the eardrum/aural-nerve translates the air vibrations that are the word, with the chemoelectric process that is the interpretative context of the brain. Meaning may be something else as well—as mental occurrences may involve something in addition to as well as brain-processes. But I am sure that they are at least this, which is why empirical exploration strikes me as the only practical way to get seriously further in either discussion.

  22. Many scientists and mathematicians fool themselves into thinking there is something eternal about, say, a mathematical proof.

  At Marilyn’s bookstall, yesterday, I was browsing in a seventeenth century Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements. Things Euclid took as proofs would horrify—if not bewilder—a modern university senior in math. Euclid’s personal idea of mathematical rigor is entirely different from ours. Fashions in proofs change only a little more slowly than fashions in dress. What is considered to require a proof today is considered self-evident tomorrow. What was considered self-evident yesterday, today is the subject of a three-hundred-page exegesis whose final conclusion is that it just cannot be rigorously established at all!

  A mathematician will tell you that a set of proofs, all from one mathem
atician, may, for example, generate information about the author’s personality. I will certainly agree with anyone who says that such information is probably not terribly important to the proofs’ substance. But anyone who says the information is not there is simply blind.

  Even mathematics has its subjective side. And, as extremes come around to touch, one argument gaining popularity now is that something as abstract as “mathematical logic” may turn out to be what, after all, subjectivity actually is.

  23. Art conveys possibilities of information to society, i.e., the possible forms information may take. The value of art is in its richness of form. (Cf. Charles Olson’s advice to writers that, without necessarily imitating reality in their fiction, they should keep their fiction “up to” the real.) The relation of art to the world is the aesthetic field of a given culture, i.e., in different cultures art relates to the world in very different ways.

  24. Thoughts on my last sixteen years with Marilyn: living with an extra-, ordinarily talented and temperamental poet is certainly the best thing that could happen to a prose writer. I wonder, however, if it works the other way around . . .? When we fall asleep, like teaspoons, the baby (due in two months) tramples me in the small of my back. But they seem such definitely nonhostile kicks. You can tell it’s just exercise. This evening, for practically a minute and a half, it kicked at almost regular, seven-second intervals, till Marilyn got up from the armchair (a little worried). Well, considering its daddy, it ought to have a good sense of rhythm. (I say living with a talented and temperamental poet is good for a prose writer; but I suspect living with a talented and temperamental poet who happens to possess a rather acute business sense helps too . . .) [Note: Our obstetrician, Mrs. Ransom, says that when the baby presses against an artery in the womb, often a highly regular spasming of part of the uterine wall can occur, easily confusable with the baby’s kicking. Nothing to worry about. But we do not have a budding Ruby Keeler or Bill Robinson in our midst. Just a pressed artery in some positions.]

  25. I suspect the logical atomism of both Russell and Wittgenstein would have been impossible without the visual atomization the Impressionists had already subjected the world to on canvas (and that the Cubists were subjecting it to concurrently with Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work). In fact, what is basically wrong with Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of language” is that it rests on an aesthetically simpleminded concept of the way in which a picture relates to what it is a picture of. The twenty-seven-year-old Wittgenstein simply held an amazingly naive view (or, more generously, an extreme nineteenth-century-derived view) of the way in which a picture is a model of a situation. The mistake at Tractatus 2.261 is heartrending:

  There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all.

  If for must be and identical he had substituted is obviously and similar— and then taken up the monumental task of running these words down to their propositional atomization—he would have solved the problem of the modular calculus (i.e., the critical problem).

  The point is: There is nothing identical in a picture and what it depicts. There is nothing identical in the model and what it is a model of. Nothing, nothing at all! They share not one atom in common! They need not share one measurement! Only the perceptive context imposes commonality on them, for a variety of learned and physiological reasons. (G. Spencer-Brown’s elegant, elegant argument wobbles, ultimately, on the same pivot point.) There are only identical processes some thing else can undergo in response to both—emblematic of their relation. And, presumably, different processes as well—emblem that the two (original and depiction) are distinct and, possibly, hierarchical.

  For A to be recognized as a model of B, first a set of internal relations, as A relates to itself, must be read from A, then processed in some way probably similar to a mathematical integration; then another set of internal relations must be read from B (some of the relations may be similar to those read from A; but they need not be) and then integrated (by a similar process; or by a very different one), and the two results compared; if I find the results congruent, then I recognize A as a model of B in the context of the joint integrative process that produced the congruent results. But information about A may come to me via photograph, while I may have to gather information about B, blindfolded, with just my hands, from miniature plastic sculptures. Even so, if I have developed the proper interpretative context, I may well be able to recognize that, say, some small, plastic object B is a model of the photographed object A (checkable against a sight model when the blindfold is removed), while other small plastic objects C, D, and E are not—in terms either of the context I’ve developed, or in terms of the more usual sight context—models of A.

  26. About every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different statements can be made. For every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different models can be made.

  27. On one side of a paper write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is true.” Now turn the paper over and write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is false.” Now put down your pencil; and turn the paper over several more times, considering the truth and falsity of the statements you have written—till you perceive the paradox.

  The young Bertrand Russell noted that the whole of the Principia Mathematica remained shaky because of it; he came up with one resolution that, later, as an older man, he repudiated. Karl Popper has, somewhere, a proof that it cannot be resolved at all.

  It can.

  But to follow the resolution, fold up the paper and put it in the breast pocket of your Pendleton, as I did on the train platform in South Bernham one May, and come along with me.

  Vanessa Harpington had gone off painting in North Africa, but had sweetly left the keys to her country home circulating among various of her Camden Town friends. So I’d come down to pass that summer in a fine old English house with my friend Alfred, himself the long-haired nephew and namesake of a rather infamous Polish Count K.

  One rainy afternoon, I was in the sitting room, with a sketch pad, making a drawing of the scene outside the window—rain splashing through the leaves of one of the small sycamores in the yard—when Alfred, smoking a meerschaum carved into a likeness of A. E. Van Vogt, wandered in, looked at my drawing, looked out the window, looked at my drawing again, and nodded. After a moment’s silence, he said: “Would you say you are making a model of the situation outside the window?”

  “I suppose you could call it that,” I said, sketching a line in for the drapery’s edge.

  “Would you say that it models the fact that it is raining?”

  “Well, all those slanted lines are supposed to be raindrops. And the runnels of water on the windows there . . .” I looked up.

  Alfred had stepped forward. The streaming pane silhouetted his hawkish features. He took another pull on his pipe and, expelling small puffs of smoke, intoned: “Truth . . . Falsity . . . Model . . . Reality . . .” and glanced back.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. There was a sweetish aroma in with the tobacco.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” Alfred said, “that logically speaking, ‘true’ and ‘false’ can only be applied to statements about the real; but that it is nonsense to apply either one directly to the real? I mean—” He took his pipe and pointed with the stem toward the window; his long hair swung—“if, in here, in the sitting room, you were to make the statement, ‘It is raining outside,’ or some other model of the situation you perceive through the glass—”

  “Like a drawing?”

  “—or a sculpture, or a photograph; or a flashing light that, by arrangement, we had both agreed to interpret as, ‘It is raining outside,’ or some abstract mark on a piece of paper, or an arbitrary set of musical notes that we had some such similar agreement—”

  “A sign—” I said. “An image, a symbol—”

  “I said a model. Do accept my terminology.” The partially silhouetted head coc
ked. “I’m only trying to save you pages and pages of semiological hair-splitting. Now: As I was saying, suppose I chose to model the situation outside with the statement, ‘It is raining outside,’ rather than the way you are, with a pencil and paper, then you might have come along, observed my model—or, in this case, heard what I said—observed the garden through the window, and commented: ‘That is a true statement.’ Or, if you will, ‘That is a true model.’—”

  “I think that’s a rather limited way to look at, say, well any aesthetic model.”

  “So do I! So do I!” said Alfred. “But if we had agreed that we were going to use the model in that way, for the purely limited purpose of obtaining information about a limited aspect of reality—say, whether it was or was not raining—then we could.”

  “Okay. If we agreed first.”

  “But, by the same token, you can see that it would be perfectly ridiculous for you to come along, point out the window and say, ‘The outside is true,’ or ‘The rain is true,’ or even ‘The rain outside is true’.”

  “Oh, I could say it. But I do get your point. If I did, I wouldn’t be using ‘true’ in any truly logical way; I’d be using it metaphorically; aesthetically if you will; as a sort of general intensifier.”

  “Precisely. Do you see, then, what allows one to put ‘true’ or ‘false’ on a model, such as my statement on your picture?”

  “I suppose,” I said, squinting at my paper and considering asking Alfred to step just a little aside beside he was blocking a doffing sycamore branch, “It’s because I’ve been working very hard to get it to look like what . . . I’m modeling—Alfred, do you think you might move to the left there just a bit—”

  “Oh, really!” Alfred stepped directly in front of the window and jabbed his pipe stem at me. “All Vanessa’s oak paneling, these leather bindings and dusty hangings, seem to have addled your brain. A statement doesn’t look like the thing it models! When I say ‘It is raining,’ neither the ‘it’ nor the ‘is’ refers to anything real in the situation. And the position of the pointer on that barometer dial over there—just as good a model of what’s going on outside as any of the others we’ve mentioned—has no internal structure similar to the situation it’s modeling at all (though it’s attached to something that has an internal structure dependent on it; but that’s a different story)! No, some structural similarity may explain why you choose to use a particular thing for a model, but it is the use you are putting it to—the context you are putting it into, if you will—that, alone, allows you to call it ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Truth and falsity, the potential for being true or false, are not manifestations of the internal structure of the thing that is, potentially, to be so labeled. They are, rather, qualities ascribable to a given thing when, in a particular context, it is functioning in a particular way, i.e., modeling some situation truly (however we choose to interpret that) or modeling it falsely (however we choose, given a particular, modular context, to interpret that) . . .”